It's not peculiar to China. Look at world population figures. Population didn't start to explode until the Industrial Revolution. Before 1850 the population of the entire planet was under a billion for all of history, and stayed roughly constant for long stretches.

I came across this interesting graph while doing some research a few months ago. If this information is correct, there were a number of centuries-long population plateaus in chinese history, and even some population declines. Some of those no doubt coincide with geopolitical changes, whereby the territory controlled by "China" was smaller during some periods. Nonetheless, it's interesting to note how the graph only really starts to take off over the last few centuries, then becomes near-vertical in the 20th century.
http://www.china-profile.com/data/fig_pop_0-2050.htm

By the way, anyone who's interested in i.e. world population statistics should check out Gapminder. It's a great site for statistics nerds. Also, if you haven't yet seen any videos by Hans Rosling, a Swedish professor specialized in statistics, you should do that. He tells things how they are but does it in an amazingly entertaining way without forgetting actual fact and statistics. Regards, a statistics nerd.

I'm listening to the "History of Byzantium" podcast right now. One thing that is interesting is that the empire struggled with depopulation, due to the plague and other factors. So they would sometimes send raiding parties outside the empire, capture some people, and then force them to resettle in Anatolia in order to repopulate it.

Here's a mind-blowing fact: Middle-aged and older people alive today are the only people who have ever lived, or will ever have lived, through a doubling of the world population. (I don't remember the exact years of birth for the group of people who fit this description, but it's a fairly narrow range of years.) For people who died before that time, the population wasn't growing fast enough to double in a person's lifetime. For people who were born after that time, the population will never double from what it was when they were born.

Also, depending on which projection of future population growth is most accurate, it's entirely plausible that a person born tomorrow could yet see the global population double again within his or her lifetime. Given advances in medical technology and the steadily increasing lifespan of homo sapiens, it's also entirely plausible that I could see the global population triple within my lifetime.

Current world population is 7.5 billion. That's about double what it was in 1971. Assuming some people live to be 100 years old... everyone back to 1850 had a shot at seeing the figure double before they croaked. 1850... right around the year I gave before for when the population started to skyrocket thanks to the Industrial Revolution. Before that the rate of increase was not great enough. Unless you go back around 70,000 years ago when supervolcano Toba erupted. Some anthropologists estimate our numbers may have dipped as low as "40 breeding pairs" at that time, meaning the total global human population could have easily doubled within a generation afterward.